Union of Virgins, 2024. Kasra Jailipour.

Join us for On Trans Embodiment: Reclaiming Queer Martyrdom and Trans Saints with Kasra Jalilipour and M Lissoni.

This session will begin with a conversation between Kasra and M, exploring transmasculine iconographies, experiences of religious ecstasy, and how personal archives and exhibition-making can challenge institutional faith.

Kasra will lead ‘What Is a Prayer?’, a spoken ritual that functions as both an act of devotion and a gesture of subversion, created through reading together, voice by voice, line by line. Following this, M will invite participants to join ‘The Trans Bible’, a collaborative process of authorship through erasure, where fragments of a book are marked and removed to remake its meaning collectively.

This event is free to attend and will be held at Auto Italia. To book, please register here, or contact info@artworkassociation.org

Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian-born artist, writer, and educator based in Derbyshire UK. They often use speculative histories and fictions to re-tell stories through a queer lens. They have an ongoing body of research looking for fragments of queerness hidden in Iran’s Qajar era, and specifically centring intimacy, eroticism and gender nonconformity.

M Lissoni is a London-based transdisciplinary artist and founder of STIGMATA, a publishing and curatorial platform rooted in collective ritual, decolonial archiving, and transcultural dialogue. Their work spans installation, print, and moving-image, often focusing on the sacred, the silenced, and the in-between.